Chadwick v. Industrial Commission

Petitioner’s decedent, a 39-year-old pipe fitter, was working on a scaffold or platform 70 to 75 feet in the air as part of a crew installing downspouting in the Clinton Nuclear Power Plant when he fell to his death. At the time, the crew was making its way off the scaffold to a temporary stairway. The arbitrator denied a claim for benefits because, at the time of the fall, decedent was in direct violation of a specific safety rule requiring the use of safety belts which, in the words of the arbitrator, constituted “an unreasonable and unusual risk totally unnecessary to the incidents of his…